Facebook stunned and angered organizers of a protest against white supremacists when it disabled their Washington event’s page this week, saying it and others had been created by “bad actors” misusing the social media platform.
The company said the page — one of 32 pages or accounts it removed on Tuesday from Facebook and Instagram — contravened its ban on “coordinated inauthentic behavior” and might be linked to an account created by the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA), a so-called troll farm that has sown discord in the US.
However, the organizers of next weekend’s protest in Washington say Facebook has unfairly and recklessly tarnished their work by suggesting their event could be linked to a Russian campaign to interfere in US politics.
Black Lives Matter DC organizer April Goggans said that protest organizers began planning the event before the Facebook page’s creation.
Organizers have set up a new page, but Goggans said she fears Facebook’s crackdown left many people with the false impression that a Russian bot is behind their event.
“Our participation may take a hit because people are trying to find out what’s legit and what’s not,” she said on Wednesday.
For weeks, activists have been planning a counterprotest to the Washington rally organized by Jason Kessler, the principal organizer of last summer’s deadly white nationalist gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Hundreds of Facebook users clicked on the event’s Facebook page to signal their intent to attend the counterprotest.
Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, said in a statement on Tuesday that “inauthentic” administrators of a page called “Resisters” connected with administrators from five legitimate pages to cohost the event and enlist support from “real people.”
“These legitimate pages unwittingly helped build interest in ‘No Unite Right 2 - DC’ and posted information about transportation, materials and locations so people could get to the protests,” Gleicher wrote.
Gleicher’s statement said that Facebook disabled the event page on Tuesday and reached out to the administrators of the five other pages “to update them on what happened.”
Facebook also planned to report the issue to about 2,600 users who had expressed interest in the event and to more than 600 users who said they planned to attend it.
Andrew Batcher, an organizer for the Shut It Down DC coalition formed to protest Kessler’s rally, said the event page created by “Resisters” was taken over and controlled by “a lot of real people doing real work.”
He has not seen any evidence that any of administrators for the “Resisters’ page was a “bad actor,” Batcher said.
“All the content on the page came from local organizers,” he said. “Facebook took it all down, which I see as censorship of a real protest event.”
Researchers at the Atlantic Council, a nonprofit working with Facebook to analyze abuse on its service, said the accounts identified for removal sought to promote divisions between Americans. The accounts seemed focused on building an online audience and moving it to offline events such as protests.
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